The AHRC Network: A New Global Microhistory Pathway (Warwick, Oxford, EUI and V&A) held the first of three late evening public discussions in ‘The Globe’ at the V&A on Friday 19 October 2018. Organised by professor Maxine Berg, this event brought together a new generation of historians and curators to articipate in a public discussion of the microhistories and material cultures that objects, from treasure chests to tea sets, in the Europe Gallery open. A recording of the discussion can now be found here.

The ‘transnational’ is an old theme in British imperial history, though continually reinventing itself in new interventions and guises. The two-day workshop Between and Beyond: Transnational Networks and the British Empireengaged with a number of important conceptual and historiographical questions in the field of British imperial history. What role does the British empire play in the facilitation of networks within, without and beyond its boundaries? Do we need to think of the networks of the British Empire following Tony Ballantyne’s metaphor of a “web”? Is the web of networks in the British Empire made of only main arteries or of “multiple filaments”? And what does ‘transnational’ bring to the field of imperial studies, particularly when posited with the ever-expanding category of the ‘global’? By Somak Biswas and Dr Guillemette Crouzet.

Can there be a global microhistory? This is the question behind the AHRC Global Microhistory Network, which held its first conference at the University of Warwick on 17-19 May 2018. The conference was entitled A Different Point of View: Scales, Spaces and Contexts in the History of the Local and the Global. It consisted of a combination of empirical and methodological papers that examined ‘the global framing of the local’, to quote from the conference blurb. In this post Dr Michael Bycroft summarises the main themes of the conference, which will be followed by a second post in which he offers a number of more in-depth reflections and opinions on them. Stay tuned!

A new generation of historians challenges us to bring together two popular historical methodologies of recent decades: microhistory and global history. A number of micro-historians now seek to engage in the histories of places, events and individuals in a way that also captures the history of global connections as brought to life by global historians. Global historians also seek to move beyond large-scale syntheses and comparative data sets to engage closely with primary sources, philology, and local context. ‘Scales, Space and Contexts in Histories of the Local and the Global’ is the first of a cycle of three conferences on this new pathway of Global History. Taking place at Warwick on 17-19 May 2018, it brings together leading historians to address issues of connection and agency, local spaces, and the multiple contexts of our histories of events and individuals. In this blog, Prof Maxine Berg reflects on the issues underpinning the AHRC Global Microhistory Network.